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Tuesday, 19 December 2006 16:55 |
 | | Mark West |
I can remember when I first encountered sleaze culture. It was back when I was in graduate school, and one of my professors was doing a presentation on Madonna.
This was in the early 1980s, and I assumed I knew what was coming. Madonna was (and is) a second-rate singer, with the sort of manufactured pop appeal that the music industry cranks out like so much sausage. This, coupled with what struck me a cleaned-up burlesque act, was about all I could see going on with Madonna.
Well,
my professor set me straight. My views on Madonna were provincial; the
star was a liberated woman, celebrating her sexuality, I was told. It
was not a matter of taste whether I liked Madonna; it was a measure of
my support for women and their liberation.
I was, at the
time, baffled. I had assumed that the purpose of womenës liberation was
that they should earn what men earned for comparable work, be treated
as equals in the workplace, and the like. In my mind, the goal of
womenës liberation was to be treated as something other than sexual
entities; in that, I was informed, I was mistaken.
Over time, of
course, I found that feminism was as multivalent a phenomenon as any
other large-scale social or political movement. But the position that
my professor had taken was not an uncommon one; and the result was that
well-meaning people performed a lot of mental gymnastics to make the
physical gymnastics of Madonna and her musical descendants legitimate.
And this was the
beginning, I think, of the great fissure in American politics. The
left, and intellectual apparatus in the universities, became engaged in
an ongoing justification of lifestyle politics. The right, under the
guidance of economists like Milton Friedman, applied similar "me first,
you last" standards of behavior to economics, and the result was the
rise of the Gordon Gekko, "greed is good" era in Republican politics.
What we ended up
with is a Democratic Party that seemed committed to celebrating every
lifestyle, no matter how bizarre, and a Republican Party than seemed
committed to celebrating greed in all its manifestations, no matter how
antisocial. The American public, in favor of neither extremity, was
left to oscillate between the two parties, voting Democratic when the
corruption and greed got too bad, voting Republican when the
traditional values that most citizens favor seemed to be too
threatened.
The two parties
were no longer talking about the allocation of resources, which is what
politics is supposed to be about. Both parties maintained their
stranglehold on power, of course; but both parties began to concentrate
on "lifestyle issues." And so did the American public. In so doing,
America entered a long national slumber in which important political
issues like health care, civil rights and the developing American
empire went undiscussed while the American public endlessly debated the
sort of moral issues ÇƒÏ issues that are simply not the purview of
government.
This is, of
course, the reason that American voter participation is so low. And,
make no mistake, the last election was by no means a repudiation of
"family values;" it was a repudiation of greed and an unpopular war. If
the Democrats take it as some sort of larger mandate, they will be
mistaken.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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